"Go and listen to the music, daddy. You need sweetening to-night."
The rough big fellow looked deep into her eyes. "I'd go plumb crazy in this life without you, little girl."
"Sure you would," she agreed contentedly. "Now run along and do
Morani's orchestra justice. He deserves it."
He patted her cheek and returned to his favourite stand in the front door.
The evening mysteries were deepening. Already the trunks of the trees on the far bank of the river were merging into a dull mass. The play of sunlight and shadow in the nearer forest was an etching of white and black. The mellow sudden Western night was dropping glamorous mantle over the familiar scene, softening the crudeness of the camp and exalting the dying round of the forest's fight for solitude. The sand of the grade gleamed with evening tint of ochre. The network of the trestle was a maze of incised lines against the shaded bank opposite. A solitary bird, astir beyond its bedtime, hovered against the sky, cheeping to unseen brood below. Some swift-vanishing creature—wolf or coyote—ran along the edge of the distant bank for a fearful, curious glimpse of the persistent invasion of its venerable privacy. The sun, like a mocking challenge, was painting with flaming hand its tremendous but fleeting colour-picture on the northwest sky, where clouds unseen by day hung ever ready for the evening-hour brush of the great artist.
The dirty canvas of the camp was laundered by the mysteries of twilight. Living groups lay peacefully about the river bottom, gambling, Torrance knew. For the moment the orchestra was resting. But snatches of hideous sound came wafting on the evening air as music; concertina, fiddle, mouth-organ, with here and there a cornet, a mandolin, a guitar, many breathing individual melody, merged into one vast harmony. Rasping voices lifted themselves in song. No laughter, no shouting—only the sounds of men whose memories are more sensitive than their feelings, who live in the past or the future, never in the present. Evening was fluttering gently down, mellowing line and tone.
Even to Big Jim Torrance at such an hour came the appeal of dimly reverent things. Here on the fringe of prairie and forest, in the vast spaces of Northern Canada where wolf met coyote, Torrance was waging a big fight. Last year he had brought the grade, a simple task, east of the mountains. Somewhere far down the list of sub-sub-contractors—fleas on larger fleas almost ad infinitum—he had built that gleaming line of yellow sand that held the sleepers and the rails—almost with his own hands. From far over the horizon to the east he had crept along westward, urging on his big gang with relentless but just hand. And out there before his door they had driven the last spike at the very edge of the valley that cut the landscape.
There was the end of his contract. Eastward the line awaited only the final ballasting. Westward—that was different.
The great river chasm that had ended his task was baffling O'Connor, the bridge contractor. For the irregular, winding gouge in the earth, reminder of the day when some tremendous torrent teemed there from the mountains hundreds of miles to the west, was more than a mere cutting to fill. Eleven hundred yards, one foot, four inches from bank to bank (Torrance knew every measurement to the last inch), by one hundred and forty-one feet, eight inches deep, was task enough. Where the railway was to span the Tepee River, meandering in the midst of the valley, the water ran only seventy yards wide; nowhere in sight was it more than one hundred and fifty. And there was solid bottom to it.
But down there, one hundred and fifty feet below Torrance's eyes, was two hundred yards of quicksands. There lay the real job.